cureforbedbugs:

theremixbaby:

if you can be a nerd about comedy or sports or beer or cars or other traditionally not-nerdy things then why can’t you be a nerd about shoes or reality tv or skin-care or pilates or celebrity gossip or hair dye? are girls who take multiple pictures of their outfits every single…

I suppose I’ve always thought that “nerd” lost its power as a word worth fighting over when it stopped being, for the most part, a pejorative classification. Its power seems to be in the classroom, where words that people might readily identify with also serve as pejoratives for the other side. So jocks might call themselves “jocks,” but if you’re called a jock, it’s often by the freaks or nerds or [insert category] who identify against the jocks. Same for nerds, greasers, freaks, skaters, emos, etc.

I don’t find “nerd” being used pejoratively to describe teh kidz these days in the schools I work at. “Dork” still has some potency as a pejorative, except no one would also self-identify as a “dork” (I suppose Zooey Deschanel is trying to change that with “adorkable”?). I was a dork in K-12, but never took pride in the word. Whereas there was still a glimmer of something worth fighting for in “geek,” though by high school (c. late 90s) even that was being co-opted out of high school social territory.

I would suggest we discard the word “nerd” altogether, actually, and try to find words that have some bite left in them. In that sense, “jock” and “freak” still seem to have some juice left socially (Tumblr often seems to be an exercise in freaks stickin’ it to the jocks, on some level). But not “nerd.” A better spectrum that I remember from K-12 days was the poser, a debilitating classification that surely still has at least as much power now in whatever field you care to care about. Elle was not a poser, but I’m not sure what a poser/poseur in her field would be “posing as.” Probably not a “fashion nerd,” which strikes me as too neutral a description to be subject to having “poser” applied to it.

Perhaps when “nerds” became a distinct culture, complete with naming their posers, they made the transference of power over to the “jock” side of the spectrum, where being labeled as something becomes a label of resentment rather than contempt. My guess is that the commonly-resented social classes (hipsters, jocks, [neo-]nerds/geeks) do indeed hold contempt for other groups, but I can’t think of who, exactly. (My wife reminds: “jocks don’t always have privilege” — which makes me think I’ll need to rethink my resent/contempt divide a bit. I suppose I’m thinking of social power structures — whether jocks genuinely hold privilege in the social landscape, they often appear to, whereas I don’t think the same was always true of the “nerd,” but that this distinction has perhaps changed.)

EDIT: At this point, I should also say KOGAN TO THREAD.

Dave, I actually don’t have much to add here, except that the word I would discontinue isn’t “nerd” but “privilege,” which means many potential things at once — not a drawback in itself, but like all buzzwords it’s used as if it’s communicating far more clearly than it actually is.

Anyhow, while, e.g., terms like “greaser” and “jock” have a tinge of the pejorative, at least at some times and in some places, they also, depending again on the time and place, designate groups that can wield power. That is, if some jocks are getting away with designating a lot of other kids as nerds, back when “nerd” meant a particular flavor of social cluelessness, but the ones called “nerd” don’t self-identify together and cluster together, then nerds don’t wield collective power, even if they get grouped together in other people’s eyes. But once they do self-designate and cluster, they likely also wield power, even if it’s less power than that wielded by jocks and preps.

EDIT: Also, has “hipster” ever, anywhere, not been a pejorative? (As opposed to “hip,” “beat,” “freak,” etc., which managed at times to indicate status, though that didn’t necessarily remove all the pejorative connotations.)